William Blake's prophetic art and poetry
Copyright 2005 David Whitmarsh-Knight. This blog is an important component of www.thefourzoas.com and the ideas within copyrighted. No part can be used without unambiguous and specific permission from the author of this web-site. My thanks to Jody Shipley for his freely given web work...his generosity and commitment to the enhancement of his students and friends is acknowledged and deeply appreciated.

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Saturday, 9 June 2007

i was revising Jerusalem, and taking my narrative from one Blake narrative 'frame dynamic' to his next: from an infinite view downwards and inwards into Albion......this is a critically unique hypotheses.....for the first time Blake's two-fold, three-fold and four-fold vision is linked directly to Blake's text and the points of view defined from the text.........

i suggest seeing Blake is like first, looking inward through a closed transparent shell at the life within, and, then, second, being inside the life within and looking outwards to the closed circumference, that is now seen from within as an infinitely inwardly self-reflective 'independent' whole time/space continuum for that life within; like a bird in an eggshell consuming its own environment within. Christ breaks the shell from within outwards and without inwards; that is Blake's four-fold vision. thus, for the first time, we can envision Blake's infinite without and infinite within, and, for the first time, can envision Blake's two-fold, three-fold and four-fold vision....clearly linked, and clearly based upon the text .

bound within, Blake's cosmology of time and space is grasped or otherwise envisioned as the Los/Enitharmon time/space frame dynamic as it embraces and releases the compressions and expansions of Albion's component zoas and emanations. Blake's symbol of Canaan is one such example, especially seen in the descent of Jerusalem in Plate 86, Chapter 4 (c.f. swedenborg's New Jerusalem: though nothing like Blake's major prophecies, viscomi's work on blake's MHH and swedenborg is very helpful). Los and Enitharmon thus create sun and moon, the calendars of night and day and the vision of life possible to their sons and daughters as Golgonooza is built.serial time is two-fold and three-fold. four-fold vision is not serial time nor causal space. for the first time Blake's four dimensional states of vision are seen directly argued from Blake's poetry throughout the poem as a whole. this can be tested by the reader clearly in, for example, my analysis of the Sons of Eden and the Daughters of Beulah in situ in Blake's text.

i think the literary critical interpretative methodologies of recent biblical studies, properly applied, may help define structurally the range and focus of the several narrative voices and manifestations used by Blake. There are also important applications of speech-act theory and meaning. i'm impressed by derek tovey's structural methodology in 'narrative art and act in the fourth gospel' (sheffield academic press), in particular chaps 2, 3 and 4 and his conclusion. i will return to this writer in another blog. my studies of the fourth gospel at sydney university school of divinity helped guide me into stricter textual support than those acceptable, indeed (following barthes), necessary to literary criticism's speculative aesthetic and philosophical insights. hence my methodology focuses on the text and its demonstrable clarities of meaning.

in a critical sense the reader never 'leaves' Blake's text. the critical context illuminates that which the reader reads directly. i do not hold that a critical rosetta stone of debate stands between Blake and the reader's direct apprehension. my work should be read....once Blake's mythic logoi is grasped his themes are illuminated and his meanings multiplied.